Tuesday, November 24, 2009

I'll get this out of the way first: I like this comic, at least more than usual. The style of prank is the sort of thing that I think Mr. Hat is funniest at: A whole lot of work for a rather petty (and ironic) conclusion. In this case, making the head of the American Skeptics Society believe in Evil Spirits. Not excatly helpful for any goal besides general impish pranksterism.

That said, silent hammers? What? I think Fred's edit was perfect on this:

Not only is this a crazy implausible idea, not only is it one that the characters seem to brush off like "oh hey, silent hammer, that's cool, i guess, but why?" but it is totally unnecessary! There's plenty of ways that Mr. Hat could have accomplished this goal without needing something as massively silly as "silent hammer." maybe he could have taken all the furniture out of the apartment and sawed it or whatever a few blocks away? Maybe he could just use glue to make some tables taller? I mean, once you've broken into the house you have a lot of options. Heck, just move things around, or leave like creepy notes places. Implausible? Sure. But this is the same guy who filled the US Capitol with playpen balls. So presumably he has some skills. Anyway, it's all more plausible than silent hammer.

But, once you get beyond that (if you get beyond that), then I think this is a nice return to the sort of shenanigans Mr. Hat got famous for.

now that i've written something nice, I fully expect to be attacked as soft-on-xkcd from the more rabid anti-xkcders out there.

I'm offended that Randall thinks that the head of American Skeptics Society (whoever that is) would instantly believe in ghosts as soon as he experiences something paranormal. A skeptic would never ever attribute anything to paranormal, by definition. So, this comic is fail.

Well, skepticism only exists if there's still significant doubt about the supernatural. No skeptic could try to explain paranormal by way of "Silent Tools." Cause you know, silent tools are absurd.

Putting this into example, if you came home and suddenly, all this weird stuff started happening. You wake up in bed, suffering amnesia about it, and you'll come to one of 3 conclusions.1. It was a dream.2. Perhaps ghosts and stuff do exist...3. I've got it! It's some guy whose got an unexplainable personal grudge against me, made an elaborate hoax to trick me, built silent tools somehow, made scratching noises on my wall, piped gas into my home, rearranged my furniture/upholstery with aforementioned silent tools, and disappeared into the night!

Well, a skeptic wouldn't be pleased with the first option, because it doesn't disprove the alternative, that is, if he were conscious during the ruckus.

He wouldn't be satisfied with the second option, as it goes against what he unconditionally believes in.

If he chooses the third option, no one in their right mind would believe him, it's just so ABSURD. (In fact, even the existence of silent tools might be considered paranormal from a physicist's perspective.)

So he can choose option 1 or 2, and neither one appeals to him. In the end, quote Black Hat Guy "Yeah, it doesn't end well for him".

CAPTCHA: Rexpate. What you get after mixing Dinosaur Comics and powertools.

I would suspect that this was done by a human. As for his motives, that's an entirely different story. And if I was a president of some skeptics society, I would definitely expect someone to try to prove me wrong by demonstrating me ghosts'n'shit.

It's up to Black Hat to explain how he made silent hammer that doesn't violate the laws of physics anyway.

Also the world of xkcd (if there even is a coherent world) does have ghosts (see "Bloody Mary") so any skeptic in such a world is really hardcore - even a repeatable experiment, such as Bloody Mary mirror, wouldn't convince him. So it's even less likely that Black Hat's sheganigans would convince him.

I think the previous discussion thread killed the comic by the mere mention of Amélie Poulain. I don't wanna spoil the film, but those who've seen it will understand when I say that the use of "silent tools" displays either ABSOLUTE LAZINESS of Randall, for not even trying to come up with a better idea, or an urge to be "quirky" and "odd" that completely kills the comic: if such things as "silent tools" could be possible, then evil spirits couldn't be that far away from the truth anyway. It's pretty idiotic for a character to try to confuse a skeptic by pretty much completely cheating physics -- you know, there IS a reason why most video games don't let you put your name on the high score table if you use cheat codes.

Either way, the new comic ain't bad. It's absurdly formulaic and again tries to cater for the nostalgia fans with an obvious item of PC culture, but this would have been hilarious if done 300 comics ago. And next Friday: xkcd features Chip's Challenge!

Why exactly are silent tools impossible/improbable, sure it sounds like a stretch. If it's possible to silence something as loud as a gun, why wouldn't it be impossible to do that to other stuff, of course not the same way you would silence a gun...

Anon, to silence a hammer on the same way you'd silence a gun you'd have to muffle the bashing, which would make the hammer useless. Because, you know, it works by bashing things into place.

Now, comments on today's comic...

Comic 667: yet another reference. One I recognize, in fact, from an endless gallery of Windows 95 games. I can almost feel nostalgia coming, but Randall will not get the best out of this nerd!

So: I never knew there was a way of getting past that damned monster. I thought of it as some sort of time cap. Knowing it was escapable, after all, is something new for me...

But it doesn't excuse Randall of:

a) throwing a reference instead of working a joke;b) postponing the joke into the alt-text(I liked it);c) throwing aways the two last panels. Sincerely, they were useless;

In fact, I think this comic could be better if just he got rid of the fourth panel and put the alt-text in the last one, like in the second panel. And then try to do better with the alt-text. And maybe replacing that thought bubble with a box, as if it was a narration, and not a thought...

Hey, I think this is the first time I actually suggest something to make the comic better...

The plot feels like it has been done before. Mrs. Stupid cutting bits of wood off furniture to make her husband think he is growing, Calender Man hiding in the walls to drive Falcone mad, every Scooby Doo villian. But, none I have seen quite like this. So while I suspect it is unoriginal, I will nonetheless give Randy the benefit of the doubt.

And besides, that isn't why I hate this comic. I hate it because of the last panel. The prank would not need to have a point, except that character asks for one. Randy forces himself to give more information. And this would be fine, good even, except that we DON'T end up getting a point. We learn only that the victim is a lead skeptic. Which explains why this -sort- of prank, but not why a prank is being committed at all. No reason for Mr. Hat to target this guy... ultimately, Rand invokes a question and fails to answer it. Sloppy.

Second to that, it is a terrible choice of victim if the reader happens to think at all. He is a skeptic. That does not imply that he would be bothered by evidence of ghosts. Just like an atheist is not someone who hates god, a skeptic is not someone who necessarily wants ghosts to be fake. And, surely, he is the person most likely to -investigate- the scratching. Perhaps open the wall to see if an animal is trapped in there. Mr. Hat has stupidly picked a victim most likely to discover the trick!

So, to improve? Remove the last panel, replace it with something funny.

"And maybe replacing that thought bubble with a box, as if it was a narration, and not a thought..."

Crap, I didn't even pay attention that that was a thought and not narration. That removes a lot of the funny for me. In my initial reading, I read it as the main character going on and on about reading into something deeply only to get shut down by the MALE bystander. Instead, we get no satisfaction relating to that and instead just an empty alt where the girl futily tries to assuage her fear of death (resulting from the fact that she obviously does not believe in God or any sort of heavenly reward) through a trinket.

"If it's possible to silence something as loud as a gun, why wouldn't it be impossible to do that to other stuff, of course not the same way you would silence a gun..."

Firstly, silenced guns are STILL loud enough to be discovered; it's not like in the films. Secondly, to "silence" a hammer, you'd have to stop the whole wall from vibrating, which is... well, I hope you see the problem in that. Not to mention that he has SEVERAL silent tools, which makes matters even worse for Randall.

Regarding 667: actually, I don't think the joke is in the alt-text. The joke is EXACTLY how the existentialist metaphor the girl creates goes down the drain because of an insignificant little feature. xkcd has done this pattern before, or at least very similar ones. It's nothing exciting, but it's at least reasonably decent.

Nit-pick: is it just me, or are the two "SkiFree" frames the same drawing, only with a small edit?

Okay, I honestly loved the absolute silliness of silent tools. I think that the silent tools mixes up the joke format a lot.

So sad that today he went right back to not being funny today. Exactly the same format as that one joke Douglas Adams pulled that wasn't very funny (rather deliberately so) with Fenchurch in the last Hitchhiker's book.

Fernie: much likely. Randall has shown his lazyness many times before...

About the joke... yeah, but I like the alt-text, and those two empty panels annoy me. Of course, this doesn't mean the joke is in the alt-text, I just think it'd be better if the alt-text was the joke.

Ken: awesome point, Mr. Hat was once defined as a "classhole", I don't think he needed a motive. In fact, this comic might be improved if, instead of giving a reason, he said "point? Why does it have to have a point?"

And I feel the same way about how a skeptic would really react. He'd inspect his walls and find the scratching device or the evidence that his windows and walls were changed. He'd install cameras and other sorts of devices to detect human presence. He'd investigate, goddamnit! It's weird that Randall had just mentioned Carl Sagan a few strips ago but doesn't put thought on how a skeptic would really react to that...

In an unrelated note: is 667 the first time a man outrules a woman, or are we supposed to root for "Megan" and treat "Randall" as an asshole for shattering her metaphor?

Just a thought... I didn't count the heads in SkiFree, but then they are more realistically rendered than the comic's people (with non-stick bodies). Which is odd, a cheap game having better graphics than the universe it is in has.

I have no clue how you would put both the hammer and the object getting hammered in a vacuum without all sorts of bad things happening or where you'd get the energy to actually do it or how Mr. Hat would manage to not be touching anything, but it's theoretically possible if you assume a bunch of improbable things, right?

Silent hammers seem doable to me. You could wrap it in rubber, for one. Yeah it would be a far worse hammer but it'd work, and be sorta silent. Or have some sort of cap with a spring to go on the nail.

Or you could just use screws.

Or you know, put that knockout gas on the guy's face in a mask and then work.

Or just plug his ears.

Or like the Crandall said, just prepare fake furniture beforehand and then swap them.

Or... Oh, oh, I know! Knock the guy out, kidnap him and place him in a subtly different replica of his house, where the windows have suddenly turned to bulletproof glass and the doors are locked and his keys won't work. Or he can leave but the house is in a foreign country. For even more fun, use several fake houses.

Anyway, yeah the point of BHG is absurdly elaborate pranks, but since when must they be superfluously elaborate?

You know what would've been hilarious? If Randy dropped a bridget on us and BHG turned out to be a hipster chick with short hair. Of course we've pretty much eliminated that possibility by now, I think. (Though you know, "Oh that business with his girlfriend? They were like totally lesbians, guise! Didn't you notice? LOL!")

"Silent hammer" was the only part of the strip I found funny -- of *course* it's an implausible invention, but inventing absurd devices in order to pull relatively simple pranks is perfectly in-character for hat guy.

The ultimate prank was fairly meh, but the idea of inventing a silent hammer just for the purposes of pulling it off was sufficiently amusing to elicit, from me, a chuckle. If hat guy started pulling pranks which _weren't_ completely implausible I'd be disappointed.

Yes, first you're asked to suspend disbelief that there's a silent hammer. Much like all good science fiction or fantasy, the question is not how that technology (or magic) is possible, but why, and what to do with it.

So the fact that the guy asks "why?" is actually perfectly appropriate. I think in real life, it'd be my first question, too, mostly because that's exactly what I thought as I was reading -- ok, cool, impossible, etc, but why would you ever want a silent hammer?

It's actually nice to see that there isn't quite as much hate here, just some nitpicking, this time -- it helps with credibility. Even the worst comic could turn out something decent occasionally.

"Much like all good science fiction or fantasy, the question is not how that technology (or magic) is possible, but why, and what to do with it."

Here's where you're wrong! Good speculative fiction relies on verisimilitude. While it is very possible to have a sci-fi universe where you don't have a solid scientific explanation (Star Wars, for instance), it is plausible within the universe because it's a universe of epic adventure.

Not a cuddlefish (oh wait), but I liked the comic. I don't really care that a silent hammer might be impossible. (But wouldn't it be possible to utilize 'antinoise' to pull this off?) That's not really the point either. The joke is "BHG works hard to pull off an elaborate prank". The fact that the way he works is implausible is really irrelevant to whether or not you think the joke is funny. If you didn't like the joke, it's a fair chance you wouldn't have liked it anyway, and claiming that the silent hammer is an enormous mistake and another embodiment of why xkcd is so terrible is just petty, and only goes to show how some of you have a need to find a fault with every single comic. Usually there is plenty wrong with the comic, but when there isn't, at least give the man some credit.

"So the fact that the guy asks "why?" is actually perfectly appropriate. I think in real life, it'd be my first question, too, mostly because that's exactly what I thought as I was reading -- ok, cool, impossible, etc, but why would you ever want a silent hammer?"

Personally, my first question would be "how the HELL did you manage to do that?", because a silent hammer *is* indeed something that violates a lot of physical facts, and... well, I wouldn't take that very lightly. Just imagine that someone comes to you and shows how he is able to fly, without tools or equipment or anything, and then you ask "that's neat, but why would you want to fly??". Silly, to say the least. Besides, the usefulness of a silent hammer is painfully obvious if you've had to cope with the neighbour banging and banging ad nauseam around his house -- or if YOU've had to do that in your own house and didn't want to annoy the neighbours.

um why is a silent hammer bad? It's randomly funny like kim possible coughing out bladders and ladders. Then, the ladders transform into ghandi and he fires out hammers that fire out lasers that fire out more hammers that fire out hitlers that fire out hamsters who crave the flesh of children.

Timofei, that's why Black Hat has to create essentially paranormal tools. That way it would be much easier to stump the skeptic. Skeptics aren't people who doggedly disbelieve phenomena that they can't explain.

If something like this happened to a true skeptic they'd want to stay up and see if anyone was doing anything. With silent tools and being as skilled as he is Black Hat might be able to pull it off so that any experience the skeptic tries doesn't out him.

This is why the suggestions that Carl makes for Black Hat to trick him won't work since if you didn't have something so ridiculously implausible you wouldn't be able to fool a good skeptic.

also, as other people have said, this comic is fucking retarded because black hat guy is resorting to doing something IMPOSSIBLE to fool a skeptic. that KILLS THE JOKE. He could kill himself and turn into a ghost and fucking HAUNT the guy because ghosts are just as real as SILENT TOOLS. ugh

You could, for instance, have the hammer itself sonically insulated on all sides, muffling the sound, but with an air gap so that it could vibrate within.

You could use inverse-wave noise-cancellation (somebody called it antinoise above).

You could make the hammer out of a metamaterial that vibrates at a frequency that is not audible to the human ear.

You could make it with magnetically repulsive nails, so that you swing the hammer, it never physically connects, but your swing still drives the nail inward.

The hammer might be designed to absorb the impact as energy and instead of radiating it as sound, mechanically provide a direct impulse to the nail, sort of the way a screwdriver can be a lot quieter than a hammer at getting metal rods through the same wood.

This isn't like presupposing faster-than-light travel, or, say, ghosts. There's nothing impossible in principle about a noiseless hammer, we just don't have one in practice.

I think the problem with this Venn Diagram is that two sets doesn't fully enumerate what's going on, so it's hard to follow.

Set A = Music you likeSet B = Music Pandora playsSet C = Music that is deeply embarassingSet D = Music that Pandora plays if anyone is around

We can probably say that B is a subset of A, since Pandora is pretty good. D is obviously a subset of B.

A and C are probably not the same, but have a non-empty intersection.

The joke is that D, A, and C have a non-empty intersection. Or that D is a subset of C.

I don't think I'm overexplaining the joke. This is just, you know, the thought processes required to parse the diagram provided. It's pretty convoluted, for a pretty weak payoff: "Pandora plays embarrassing songs when people are around."

It could be argued that in "SkiFree" the man does not actually outsmart the woman, but that she is the philosophical-intellectual one, and he comes and prosaically tips over her nicely built house of thoughts and ruins her day. Thus "In Xkcd women are better people" still holds.

I understood the joke from the context, but I'm not familiar with Pandora so I recalled 400 before getting the joke. I'm not complaining about the repeated joke, just explaining why it didn't amuse me.

Whenever a deeply embarrassing song comes on when I'm listening to Pandora, I usually say, "wow, this song SUCKS," and skip it. Or maybe I'm just not worried about it because my friends aren't the hyper-judgmental type?

If XKCD was gonna do a Pandora joke, how about one where THE SAME FIVE OR SIX SONGS repeat after about a day of listening to one station. So annoying!

Yes because when it's US only it means people outside the US won't know what it is. Dammit what is this kindle people keep talking about? It is not available here so I cannot possibly know about it or infer from context what it is.

I always get extremely wary when Randall makes music comics, since HE is the guy who made one strip commenting on how (presumably) he only knew rock bands from Guitar Hero, and then made another strip in which (presumably) he forced a girl on a "Mission to Culture". Yeah, now excuse me while I educate all you illiterate FOOLS on the complex economical situation of Malasia.

At least the joke is good, and I think the format works quite well. But I have a sort of radical opinion that, if you're embarrassed of the music you listen to, you should either stop listening to it or stop feeling embarrassed -- because that basically means you're unable to stand by your feelings and justify them, no? But then again, I've never been through that: I have a Charlie & Lola desktop on my work computer, I wrote an entire album with songs inspired by cartoon characters, and I love the songs from The Backyardigans and I'm NOT EMBARRASSED AT ALL. If anything, I'm sort of snobbish about it.

"You mean what? You wouldn't listen to songs by a composer as awesome and respected as Evan Lurie, just because they're made for a cartoon? What are you, some uneducated troglodyte?"

I'm also very selfless and don't like attracting too much attention to myself, really.

Now that I thought of it, today's comic is pretty much the same joke as 400, only put in a different context. I just wonder if Randall forgets about the jokes he has already done, or if he does it on purpose; face it, that joke is not really THAT vast and filled with details to justify several variations. Just one is sufficient. Today's strip, compared to 400, is horribly bland and weak, but at least it doesn't have gratuitous sex, so I guess it's a tie.

It's almost the end of the afternoon, and Carl has still not posted... I think he needs some time out and Aloria should take his place for a while. There, Aloria, I requested you! =D

Now, on 668... I think there's a serious problem with the Venn diagram... if "what Pandora plays" is a subset of "music you like", then it should have a limit. But, then again, it's not, because that'd be saying Pandora only plays what you like, and less. This couls be easily solved by substituting "Music you like" with "What Pandora Plays".

Also, I didn't know what Pandora was, so I had to look up on Wikipedia. The joke itself is a bit funny, but Fernie's right: 400, minus sex. That's a good point...

Still, sucky. I see no effort at all in this comic. It's still not as bad as "Scary", though...

668 wasn't anything special, but I did actually audibly laugh a bit at the alt text. So that's something.

Also I'm agreeing with Pro Mole, the comic would work a lot better if "What Pandora Plays" in the circle was substituted with "Music you like." Then the text "Deeply Embarrassing Music" could be in the second circle as well, and it wouldn't look as awkward with there being text in one circle but not the other. Why did he do that?

But like I said, I found the alt text funnier than the comic itself, so whatever.

TheMesosade, you seem to think it is impossible to encounter any as yet unexplained situation without making an assumption. Couldn't the skeptic, I dunno, realize he doesn't know what is happening or why?

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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